IT services giant Fujitsu knew over 20 years ago that the Horizon IT system it built for the British Post Office had bugs, but nonetheless helped its client prosecute hundreds of subpostmasters in what a senior executive has called an “appalling miscarriage of justice”.
Testifying before the UK government’s ongoing Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, Fujitu’s European region co-CEO Paul Patterson apologised for the company’s part in the debacle, which saw hundreds of subpostmasters prosecuted for fraud, theft, and false accounting due to errors in the Horizon system used to run their local branch operations.
“We were involved from the very start,” Patterson said.
“We did have bugs and errors in the system, and we did help the post office in their prosecutions of the subpostmasters.
“For that we are truly sorry.”
Data provided by Fujitsu was repeatedly used by Post Office Limited (POL) in its pursuit of the individuals – whose prosecution, fining, class-action lawsuit and struggle for compensation and exoneration was documented in a recent TV documentary that has reignited a nationwide furore as the three-year-old inquiry continues.
Asked whether Fujitsu had failed to uphold its corporate values of being an ethical company, Patterson – who said he was “personally appalled by the evidence that I have seen and what I saw on the television drama – said “the company today is quite different to the company in the early 2000s” but admitted that “we did not stand up to [expectations] in those periods of time.”
Ongoing testimony at the inquiry – the fourth phase of which is slated to continue through early February before three further phases commence – has revealed that Fujitsu knew of “significant deficiencies in the product, code and design” of the software as early as 1998.
In 2008, the development team identified two issues with a process called CABSProcess, which summarises each post office’s transactions nightly, that software developer Gerald Barnes testified “did cause inaccurate reporting of duplicate transactions in audit logs” during the migration from the original Legacy Horizon to a newer, online HNGx version in 2009.
Characterising the faults as “silent failures” because they didn’t create any error messages, Barnes said, the bugs “could have resulted in unreliable audit logs being provided to Post Office Limited or Royal Mail for a particular branch” and gone undetected in the day-to-day administration of the businesses.
Similarly, Barnes said, “really bad error handling” throughout the Horizon system meant other bugs could very well have gone unnoticed since the system’s go-live a decade earlier and “the operator at the Post Office branch would not know anything had gone wrong.”
“Error handling should have been tightened generally”, he said, noting that “it is better to produce no results than incorrect results, and good error handling should be coded from the start.”
However, with the development team focused on the HNGx migration, he said, “it would have just been too expensive to do a thorough job at that stage…. To comprehensively rewrite the error handling would be a massive job.”’
Uproar snowballs as Fujitsu repents
Revelations at the high-profile hearings have triggered a tsunami of activity amongst British politicians – Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has introduced new laws to exonerate the remaining subpostmasters and compensate them with an upfront payment of $145,000 (£75,000) – and caused consternation at Fujitsu, where many senior executives in Japan were said to have never even heard of Horizon until recently and global chief executive Takahito Tokita only recently apologised for the company’s role in the scandal.
Fujitsu shares dropped by 4 per cent, losing $1 billion in value after Patterson admitted that Fujitsu has a “moral obligation” to assist in the compensation – with UK Business secretary Kami Badenoch requesting urgent talks with the company to discuss compensation as high-profile former subpostmaster Alan Bates shellacks POL over the glacial progress of a compensation process that has left some victims waiting for over 20 years.
Fujitsu’s role in the Post Office scandal has local governments scrutinising deals with Fujitsu and driven calls for the UK government to review its engagements with the company, a key supplier that has won 101 contracts worth $3.94 billion (£2.04 billion) – including major deals with the likes of the UK Foreign Office – since the High Court’s 2019 ruling that faults in Horizon, and not the subpostmasters, were to blame.
The inquiry isn’t the only process driving a reckoning by the Fujitsu and POL teams: even as the Metropolitan Police open an investigation into possible criminal wrongdoing by POL – which is said to have taken tens of millions of pounds from the falsely accused subpostmasters – a “deeply troubled” Scottish Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain has gone on record saying that police in that country were “repeatedly misled by the Post Office”.
